The battle for the O'Connor seat

Back when everybody assumed that the first resignation from the Supreme Court would be that of the ailing Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, the battle to replace him looked relatively harmless. President Bush would nominate a conservative to replace him, and the Democrats would spend a week or so howling that the nominee was "far out of the mainstream," but eventually they would acquiesce in his confirmation without a filibuster. The ideological complexion of the Court would not be changed at all – and that is the best that the Democrats, in a Bush administration, can possibly hope for.

But this picture changed completely when Justice Sandra Day O'Connor surprised the world by resigning first. O'Connor has been, for many years, undependably conservative. Indeed, she has become the chief "swing vote" on the Court, joining its four solid liberals (Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Stephen G. Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg) to produce majorities in a number of vital cases where the liberals would otherwise have gone down to defeat. To be sure, she has also had her conservative days, but there is simply no question that her replacement by a truly dependable conservative will make it far harder for the liberals to amass a five-vote majority for their judicial preferences. Their only hope, in fact, will be Justice Anthony Kennedy, who like Justice O'Connor, has occasionally wobbled into the liberal camp.

TRENDING: The modern church and the gospel of powerlessness

So the first battle over a Bush nomination to the Court, far from being one in which the liberals have little to lose, has suddenly become one that liberals must wage with all their might. On the other side of the coin, Bush realizes that winning the battle to replace O'Connor with a steadfast conservative is very probably the only chance he will have to make a meaningful change in the Court's complexion.

For either side, therefore, a loss may truly be Armageddon.

Accordingly, the Democrats have been feverishly busy mobilizing the various pressure groups they can count on to fight at their side: Ralph Neas' People for the American Way, the National Organization for Women, the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, the Sierra Club, MoveOn.org, etc. And they have raised tens of millions of dollars to saturate the airwaves (especially in the states of vulnerable senators) with propaganda against the nominee.

The Republicans have also been raising a war chest – and have been choosing their generals for the battle with extraordinary shrewdness. In top command, apparently, will be Boyden Gray, the able lawyer who was general counsel to Bush 41. As chief public spokesman, the White House has tapped Ed Gillespie, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, who is known as a particularly effective speaker.

And, in what may be the cleverest move of all, the nominee will be accompanied, in his appearances before the Senate Judiciary Committee, by Fred Thompson, the former Tennessee senator who left politics for a career in motion pictures and television and is particularly well-known as the salty District Attorney on "Law & Order." Thompson is well-liked by senators on both sides of the aisle, and should be of enormous assistance when the nominee is being grilled by such unappeasable Democrats as Sen. Charles Schumer of New York.

That the battle will be brutal goes without saying. Senators like Schumer will insist on knowing how the nominee proposes to vote, as a justice, on such touchy issues as abortion. The nominee, almost certainly, will decline to answer such questions, citing the recent precedent of such Clinton nominees as Justices Breyer and Ginsburg. The compromise hammered out by the so-called Gang of 14 will predictably collapse, with some of the Democrats announcing this is one of those "extraordinary circumstances" that, under the compromise, justify a filibuster. A number of their Republican colleagues will thereupon endorse majority leader Frist's call for the invocation of the "constitutional option" (or "nuclear option," if you prefer) to ban filibusters on judicial nominees, and the fat will be in the fire.

The grim fact (grim, that is, from the Democrats' standpoint) is that Frist will almost certainly have the necessary 51 votes to win – and there will go the Democrats' hope of a filibuster and, with it, their last chance to beat Bush.

I can hardly wait.